1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vacuum cleaner. More particularly, the present invention relates to a cyclone dust separating apparatus for separating contaminants from drawn air, and a vacuum cleaner having the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a cyclone dust separating apparatus spins externally-drawn air or fluid therein and, thus, separates contaminants from the drawn-in fluid by using the centrifugal force generated from the spinning fluid. In other words, the cyclone dust separating apparatus is a centrifuge device, which uses centrifugal force to separate contaminants from the drawn-in fluid.
The cyclone dust separating apparatus includes a cyclone chamber in which the drawn-in fluid is rotated. The cyclone chamber is sized to correspond to the contaminants to be removed from the fluid, and generally one cyclone dust separating apparatus has a single cyclone chamber. Accordingly, in the conventional cases, a cyclone dust separating devices can only separate the contaminants that are large enough to be handled by the structure of the cyclone chamber.
Such a limited cleaning operation of the cyclone dust separating apparatus is disadvantageous especially for the cyclone dust separating apparatuses for vacuum cleaners, that are required to separate almost every contaminants regardless of particle sizes. The conventional cyclone dust separating apparatus is particularly poor at cleaning fine contaminants, and in order to solve this problem, studies have recently carried out to develop a cyclone dust separating apparatus that has a plurality of cyclone chambers and separate contaminants in multiple stages. The problem of this approach is that, as the number of cyclone chambers increases to satisfy the desired contaminant separation efficiency, the overall size of the cyclone dust separating apparatus is enlarged and structure is complicated, which is obviously not beneficial to use in the vacuum cleaner.